The Twoweeks

  OTHER TITLES BY LARRY DUBERSTEIN

  NOVELS

  The Marriage Hearse

  Carnovsky’s Retreat

  Postcards From Pinsk

  The Alibi Breakfast

  The Handsome Sailor

  The Mt. Monadnock Blues

  The Day The Bozarts Died

  STORIES

  Nobody’s Jaw

  Eccentric Circles

  THE TWOWEEKS

  a novel

  LARRY DUBERSTEIN

  Copyright © 2011 by Larry Duberstein

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

  For information, address:

  The Permanent Press

  4170 Noyac Road

  Sag Harbor, NY 11963

  www.thepermanentpress.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Duberstein, Larry–

  The twoweeks : a novel / Larry Duberstein.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-57962-224-4 (alk. paper)

  eISBN 1-57962-300-X

  1. Love stories. gsafd I. Title.

  PS3554.U253T96 2012

  813'.54—dc23 2011034626

  Printed in the United States of America.

  for Lee

  1

  Snowing in Passumpsic

  (DECEMBER 26, 2008)

  “I gotta pee,” said the boy, recently turned four, to his mother.

  “You have to hold it till the sign changes. See the picture of a buckle?”

  “Mama.”

  “We’re on an airplane, baby. They have different rules.”

  “I’ll take him,” said Jake, the boy’s father.

  “It’s not that I wouldn’t take him, big guy. It’s the seat belt thing.”

  “Come on, Al,” said Jake, hoisting him. “Don’t worry, Cissy, I’ll get special dispensation from the nice flight attendant.”

  “I’ll bet you will.”

  “Hon, the kid’s gotta go.”

  “Life can be rough,” said Cicely, lightly sarcastic yet delighted in truth to be rid of them both for a few minutes. They scared her sometimes, they were so much alike. Big guy and little guy, 180 pounds and 40 pounds, otherwise identical. And neither could hold his water for five minutes.

  She spread her arms, closed her eyes, and listened to the reassuring drone of their passage through the air above America. The flight had been so smooth it made her wonder why the seat belt sign was on. Not that she much cared; sometimes it was easier to accept such things, and pointless to question it all, as Jake did. His sister Hetty was the lawyer in the family but it was Jake who, in Hetty’s words, “ceaselessly and incessantly crossexamines the world.” (Indeed, he cross-examined her when she said it: “Ceaseless and incessant, Hetto?”)

  On the ground, inside the terminal at LaGuardia, Jake took the boy again while Cicely waited at the carousel. Jake needed to keep moving, to get it done, whatever it was. Soon enough she would be letting him drive the rental car, because there was nothing worse than allowing him into the passenger seat. Might just as well sign up for the waterboarding as undergo his running account of her every failure of muscle memory at the wheel. It wasn’t so much that he was wrong, or even obnoxious, as that he was so relentless.

  “What’s a throg?” said Al.

  Twenty minutes earlier, they had crossed the Throgs Neck Bridge, heading toward Connecticut, and since that time the boy had been trying to work this problem through on his own.

  “A throg,” said Jake, “is a frog with a speech defect.”

  “Jake,” said Cicely.

  “What’s a speech defect?” said Al.

  “Thatsh when you can’t shpeak normal.”

  “Normally,” said Cicely, correcting his grammar, before chiding his political incorrectness as well.

  “But I can speak normally,” said Al, enunciating carefully.

  “So there you are, bud. You’re not a throg.”

  They were passing through Fairfield, half an hour later, before he spoke again. “Mama, he didn’t ever tell me what’s a throg. He just kidded me.”

  “He doesn’t know, baby.”

  “You tell me, then.”

  “I don’t know either. It’s kind of a mystery, actually.”

  “Does Grandpa know?”

  She laughed. “Your grandpa knows the same way your daddy knows. He will answer the question, it just won’t be a real answer. But we can ask him, if you want, when we get there.”

  “Will Aunt Hetty know? She’s the smart one, right?”

  “We’ll ask everyone we see until we get to the bottom of the mystery, okay?”

  The boy was doing well. They had left Oregon in the predawn dark, flown six hours, and now were driving another five, with stops in Rhode Island and New Hampshire. Long before they reached their destination in Vermont it would again be dark.

  They would wait to eat, though, as Grandpa Cal was making his special spaghetti and a banana cream pie for his “favorite grandson.” Al was crazy for the banana pie, and he had reveled in the favorite grandson status until the day last summer when he realized he was the only grandson. He demanded a new title then (Favorite Grandkid) to make clear that his cousin Lorna did not compare in importance.

  “Absolutely,” Grandpa Cal readily conceded. “You are my favorite—you and Lorna, tied for the gold.”

  With that he had scooped them both up and raced downhill to the pond, where he stood them up on the splintery old table and raised their right arms in triumph. “The gold!” he declared, and Al was appeased, even if the definitions were not as precise as they might be. The truth was he liked Cousin Lorna so much he almost didn’t mind that Grandpa liked her too.

  They made good time to Providence, where Jake’s sister Hetty, cousin Lorna’s mother, lived with her husband Carlos. Carlos wasn’t coming with them, though, which seemed highly suspicious to Al. “Brazil?” he shouted, as though the very word was a joke. How could Uncle Carlos be in Brazil at Christmas time? And if that wasn’t bad enough, Lorna was bringing two suitcases, instead of the one-each allowed on airplanes.

  “Our child needs to eat something,” said Cicely.

  It was her standard prescription and generally it worked. This time, after an apple, some peanuts, and a juice-box, Al had new issues: “I’m cold,” he said, “and I gotta pee.”

  They peed him, as Jake put it, at a rest stop on 93, after which his mother said, “Al, sweetie, if it’s okay with you, we’re going to ignore you now for a while.”

  Ten minutes later, he and Lorna were sound asleep, jumbled together like puppies in the far backseat.

  “Peace in the valley,” said Cicely, with an involuntary sigh.

  “And to maintain that peace,” said Jake, “cell phones . . . off.”

  “I’m not expecting any calls,” said Hetty, by way of ignoring his edict. Jake and Cicely disdained cell phones, so the order pertained only to hers.

  “You are never expecting any calls, they just come, unexpectedly. What time is it in Sao Pãulo?”

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “Because if Carlos is awake, he is about to call. Unexpectedly.”

  “Oh, shut up,” said Hetty. A lawyer who trafficked in ornate and formal language at times, she was sometimes reduced to more direct expression by her big brother.

  “You two stop it,” said Cicely. “If they wake up, they wake up. They’re not such terrible company.”

  “Not terrible,” said Jake. “Just relentless.”

  “Oh my, look who’s talking,” said Cicely softly, amazed (yet not surprised) to hear the very word.

 
Then quiet; no one talking; the landscape rolling by like film footage.

  Winter had come late this year. Asked about the weather back east, Hetty had reported, “It’s probably the same as yours—damp, gray, in the forties. Oregon weather.” But then it had snowed, enough to submerge the yards, enough to settle on pine boughs along the highway like a million white sleeves. So it was New England weather now, the weather they were all hoping for, white Christmas and all, sledding with Grandpa, snow cones with maple syrup. . . .

  Jake and Cicely traveled east fairly often, considering the distance, and they did aim for the calendar photo moments—lilacs in May, lush summer, autumn glory, white Christmas. For Cicely this was storybook stuff, literally. She was an Oregon native, from a “pioneer family,” her grandparents liked to say. The phrase had real heft out west, though their claim was slightly divergent: they were among the first black families in Clackamas County. Some serious pioneering there.

  Jake had grown up in New England, had even stayed around for college, and though he knew all about dreary March and damp drizzly November and mud season and black flies, he wanted it to be storybook stuff too, wanted his son to see Vermont at its best. Jake, who had struggled with the idea of bringing a child into a world so badly warped by its addiction to debilitating technology, hoped Al would somehow be drawn to the natural world as powerfully as he had been.

  “It’s snowing,” said Cicely, though the snow looked phony, like TV sitcom snow, with great spaces between the floating snowflakes.

  “Not really,” said Hetty. “A few flurries, they said.”

  “Look north, Hetto,” said Jake. “Looks real enough to me. And it might be very real in Vermont.”

  “It isn’t even sticking,” she pointed out, for it was melting on the windshield and on the heavily traveled highway. But it did start collecting on the roadside and in the woods, and it was sticking everywhere by the time they hit Interstate 89 and started the northwesterly vector toward White River Junction. Farther north, on the two-lane into Hanover, it would be slow, slippery going. The worst, in a way, because it was not yet enough snow to bring the ploughs out. Hoarding their budgets against the long winter to come, hopeful road agents in each small town would be clinging to the weather report Hetty heard the night before: light accumulations, no major concerns.

  “We should wake the kids,” said Jake.

  “I thought your plan was to drug them into a submissive slumber,” said Hetty.

  “Not drug them, club them. But that was then. They’ll want to see the snow.”

  “Oh, I think they’ll be seeing it,” said Cicely, as they pulled onto the parking patch outside Iris’ rented condo in Hanover. “I believe they will see it plenty in the Northeast Kingdom.”

  “You love to say that, don’t you?” said Hetty.

  “It is just funny, sister-in-law. This itty bitty place calling itself a kingdom? You could put the whole of New England out west somewhere and never find it again.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Iris had not finished packing, of course, but she did not want them coming inside with snowy feet. “Give me one minute,” she called out from the vestibule, and in his gentlest tone Jake sought clarification (“Clock minute or Iris minute?”) just to see her make the face.

  Iris astonished each of them, for different reasons. Hetty could not believe that her younger half-sister, who had been a child to her even more so than she herself had been a child to Jake (the good old pecking order), was about to be a doctor. A full-fledged grown-up professional.

  To Jake the astonishing aspect was that this particular doctor was going, in six months, to be a Doctor Without Borders. Who needed borders more than Iris Byerly? Borders, boundaries, lines, lists, categories: whatever organized the world, Iris required. They dared not enter her house with wet shoes, knowing the trauma it would engender, and yet she was going off to Namibia or Bolivia, someplace at any rate where she would have no protection from muddy water, contaminated food, tsetse flies for all they knew. From chaos, the opposite of order.

  “A doctor without borders?” Jake had said in disbelief, when this plan was unveiled. “Does that mean you get shot at by every faction in every insane conflict everywhere?”

  “It means you get protected by every faction, dummy. You’re the doctor.”

  “Well, be sure and wear your blue hospital scrubs at all times, so they know you’re the doctor.”

  Cicely’s puzzlement had nothing to do with Iris’ chosen profession. She simply could not believe that a girl as gorgeous (and as likable) as Iris could be single. Iris’ explanation, the first time they spoke about it, was that all the boys she knew were doctors, hence all kings of the world in their own minds, hence no thanks. To which Cicely had responded, “No problem. Come west, girl, we will find you a nice logger, or a fisherman. We’ve got all kinds. Even some women loggers,” she added, just in case, for though there had been no such indications, you had to allow for the possibility.

  It had become a joke since then, back and forth long distance, and so the first thing out of Iris’ mouth as she slid in next to Cicely in the middle seat was “Where’s my logger? I thought you were bringing me a logger.”

  “Here he comes,” said Cicely, as Al dove recklessly over their heads and scrambled down onto Iris’ lap.

  “Kind of a little logger,” said Iris, ruffling the boy’s shaggy black curls, “but I guess I’ll take him.”

  “Back!” said Cicely, as though taming animals, “back where you came from, you two,” and Al and Lorna climbed over and buckled themselves in again.

  “We’re off,” said Jake.

  “I gotta pee, Daddy,” said Al, unbuckling.

  “At least he’s house-trained,” said Hetty, as Cicely rolled her eyes.

  “I’ll take him,” said Iris.

  She took them both, removing their shoes in the small foyer, disappearing inside, and reappearing after a noticeable number of Iris minutes, to begin shoeing them, as Jake put it.

  “Warning, captain,” said Hetty, while they waited. “Short cell call coming up.”

  “Carlos is awake?”

  “Wrong, bro, not who I’m calling.” Then she shushed him, as their father came on the line and she said, “It’s us. Or it’s me.”

  “Are you here yet?” said her father.

  “Not quite. We are almost being allowed to leave Iris’ house. So there’s that. But also the storm is slowing us down.”

  “Storm?”

  “Snowstorm, Pop. It’s been getting worse by the mile. It’s not snowing there?”

  “Of course it’s snowing here. It’s always snowing in Passumpsic. Snow is general over Passumpsic.”

  “James Joyce?”

  “Good for you, kid. Want to try for sixty-four thousand?”

  “Sixty-four thousand what?” said Hetty. “Do you want to talk to Jake?”

  “I haven’t talked to you yet, but no, no more phone. Just get your backsides up here and we can talk all week.”

  “Sounds a little scary, Pop. We might want to turn back. Just kidding, just kidding.”

  “You do have Iris?”

  “We do. Or she has us. But she is shutting the door behind her as we speak. She is approaching the vehicle. We should be departing Hanover in approximately one minute.”

  “Clock minute or Iris minute?”

  “Clock, I think. Yes: she is now inside the vehicle, she’s buckling up, and . . . we’re off!”

  2

  The Backstory

  Lara had found the pages she had written shortly after The Twoweeks ended—or not found them so much as excavated them from a folder in a carton in a trunk in the barn. “Who knows why” was what she said (why she had written them, why she had so stored them, why she had extracted them now) but then who-knows-why was more or less Lara’s take on life. It was not as if she ever expected an answer to the question.

  So they had this unearthed journal, they had the evening at their disposal, and sh
e guessed it would take a couple of hours to read it through, and that had become the plan. Cal had never seen it—never even knew it existed—and Lara, who had not seen it in decades, felt ready to revisit those days in detail. The Twoweeks, after all. It had been a pretty big deal.

  He made the fire, she walked the dogs to Hollenbeck’s and back, they scrounged up three unfinished bottles of bourbon (yielding perhaps a pint in all) and settled down to start. Lara did start, and managed to get halfway through a sentence before Cal lodged his first objection.

  But this was not trial testimony, subject to objection, she was obliged to point out, nor was it a piece of writing subject to correction. It was a journal. “It says whatever it says and there’s an end on it.”

  “That’s fine,” said Cal. “I wasn’t concerned with the end on it, I was concerned with the beginning. You did say you would begin at the beginning.”

  “I was hoping to. Where else, really?”

  As it happened, Cal wanted to begin before the beginning, before The Twoweeks. The “backstory,” as he kept calling it, would give shades of meaning to the journal itself.

  “You haven’t read it, Calvert. For all you know, it might already have more shades of meaning than the King James Bible.”

  Before he spoke, Lara knew exactly what he would say in response, and he did: “We aren’t in the King James Bible.”

  He didn’t know that either, she nearly countered. Countering would be counter-productive, though, if she wanted to get on with the reading. So she held her tongue.

  “Just give me five minutes,” he pleaded, tapping her handwritten heading (Day 1) with his index finger and insisting they revisit briefly “the real Day One,” the day they met, and perhaps devote another minute or two to the handful of encounters which, taken as a whole, constituted the “genesis” of The Twoweeks.

  “Otherwise it’s like saying the Civil War began in 1861. Forget about the Missouri Compromise, forget the Dred Scott Decision.”

  “Cal, the Dred Scott Decision does not come into play here. The Twoweeks is a small matter of insignificant personal history, which happens to have begun on June 22 of that year.”